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Belarus HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
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Figure 2. Belarus, 1995
SINCE THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, national activists
have
based their attempts to create an independent Belarusian
state
based on the Belorussian language, which had been kept
alive over
the centuries mainly by peasants. The stage was set for
the
emergence of a national consciousness by the
industrialization
and urbanization of the nineteenth century and by the
subsequent
publication of literature in the Belorussian language,
which was
often suppressed by Russian, and later Polish,
authorities. It is
ironic, then, that the first long-lived Belorussian state
entity,
the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (Belorussian
SSR), was
created by outside forces--the
Bolshevik (see Glossary)
government in Moscow. And it was those same forces, the
communists, whose downfall in 1991 precipitated the
existence of
an independent Belarus, which has been torn between its
desire
for independence and a longing for integration with newly
independent Russia.
The population of the Belorussian SSR was jolted into
national awareness in the late 1980s with the occurrence
of one
disaster and the discovery of another. The explosion at
the
Chornobyl' (Chernobyl') nuclear power plant in Ukraine not
only
entailed the physically damaging radiation carried by the
winds
but also came to represent the toll taken on the country's
sense
of its ethnic and cultural identity by years of
Russification (see Glossary).
These two sets of consequences affected
both the
daily lives of the Belarusians and national politics: how
was the
country to remedy the two kinds of damage?
Belarus's other disaster was the discovery in 1988 of
mass
graves containing victims of Joseph V. Stalin's
atrocities.
Although the revelation of these graves angered a broad
spectrum
of Belarusians, it actually energized only a relatively
small
group of activists to try to overcome the country's
political
apathy. Nationalists saw Stalin's actions as clear proof
of
Moscow's attempts to eliminate the Belorussian nation and
wanted
to make sure that such barbarity could not occur again.
For them,
a strong, independent Belarus was the first step in this
direction.
Data as of June 1995
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